417 Announcements
Breaking news about the course
- December 21
- Final exam grades and final course grades are posted on sakai.
- December 21
- Reminder: The final exam is tomorrow at 4 pm in room Hill-120. You will have two hours for the exam. If you plan to take it, be sure to bring your student ID to class. If you received an A as a pre-final grade, you should not take the exam. If you have decided not to take the exam and have not informed me, please let me know.
- December 12
- For the TA survey, please fill it out even if the name of the TA is listed as A. Cohen. The results will apply to Ana Paula. Please take a few minutes to fill out the surveys both for me and for Ana Paula. I'm still getting alerts that less than half the class filled out surveys. Thanks!
- December 12
-
I posted pre-final grades. Grades are posted on a standard four point scale:
Grade Score A 4.0 B+ 3.5 B 3.0 C+ 2.5 C 2.0 D 1.0 F 0.0 This pre-final grade is the grade that you will get for the course if you do not take the final exam.
You now have the option of keeping your grade or taking the final exam. The final exam will serve only to displace your lowest exam grade. At best, this accounts for under 30% of your final grade. For most students, taking the final will not result in a grade increase – I will not reward you for the act of taking this exam.
Taking a final will never result in a lower grade for the course. If you did poorly on an exam or two, good performance on a final may increase a grade. I recommend taking the final if your performance on one past exam deviated significantly from your mean performance or if you missed an exam. If your exam performance was relatively consistent but your grade suffered because of missed assignments, the final will not help you.
To help you decide whether you might want to take the final exam, I posted a need grade item. This is the minimum grade that you will need to get on the final to bump your grade to the next highest grade (e.g., from a B to a B+).
Grades are not negotiable. I tried to be fair and generous with the grading, but clearly not everyone will be getting A's and B's.
If your grade is not an A and you definitely do not plan to take the final exam, please email me and let me know.
- December 8
- I'm getting alerts from the Center for Teaching Advancement and Assessment Research that most students have not filled in the teaching assessment survey. When you get a minute, please go to http://sakai.rutgers.edu/, log in, and then click All Surveys (or wherever sakai takes you in the Rate Your Instructors category.
- December 5
- Reminder. The third exam is today. If you have limited time to study, I recommend that you read: the study guide, the first five pages of the MapReduce paper, and the first five pages of the BigTable paper.
- December 4
- Oops. Another typo in the study guide. I wrote Open Authentication for OAuth. I meant to write Open Authorization.
- December 3
- I think I've added the final fixes to the study guide.
- December 2
- Some fixes added to the study guide.
- December 2
- I've slightly updated the list of topics for exam 3. I also prepared a study guide for the exam. I did not proofread it all and I still have to add the section on Amazon Dynamo. Finally, I wrote up lecture notes on MapReduce and BigTable. These, of course, have a greater level of detail than the study guide.
- November 30
- I posted a list of topics for next week's exam. I also split out the lecture slides about Amazon's Dynamo from Clusters into a separate set of slides.
- November 29
- I posted lecture slides for fault tolerance and clusters.
- November 21
- I posted lecture slides for authentication, OpenID, Google Cluster Architecture, and Firewalls & VPNs.
- November 21
- Today is a Rutgers Wednesday. I will be giving a mini lecture during recitation hours (5:15 - 6:10 pm in Hill-120).
- November 18
- The deadline for assignment 4 is extended until 9pm November 23.
- November 16
- Recitation is canceled for today.
- November 9
- If you will not be attending recitation, be sure to submit assignment 5 via sakai before 5:15pm. Late submissions (even a minute late) will not be accepted. Today's recitation topic will be the Google search cluster architecture as well as an assignment review.
- November 9
- Lecture slides for BigTable and Cryptography are posted.
- November 2
- I posted a slightly enhanced version (6pp) of the MapReduce slides that I covered in class.
- November 2
- Recitation is canceled today.
- November 1
- A short written assignment about MapReduce is posted and is due on November 9.
- October 30
- You may do Assignment 4 either individually or in a group of two.
- October 30
- If you downloaded the study guide on Saturday evening, you may want to re-download it. My house lost power and I moved to a hotel for the night, taking my MacBook Air but was unable to sync my files from the computer I normally use at home. When I did a website update, I pushed out the pre-fixed version of the study guide. I re-applied the fixes. Also, in the sections on mutual exclusion and election algorithms, I changed the wording from "nodes" to "processes" to try to add some clarity. Sorry for any inconvenience. BTW, don't try to access pk.org. It's down until my house gets power again.
- October 28
- I fixed a few minor spelling errors in the study guide for exam 2.
- October 28
- I made substantial additions to the study guide for exam 2.
- October 26
- Assignment 4 is posted. This is a programming assignment that is due on Friday, November 18.
- October 26
- I posted an outline of topics that you should know for next week's exam. Be sure that you have the latest lecture slides and notes. I also posted a draft version of the study guide that attempts to explain everything you need to know. There are still several topics that I didn't write up but you can get an early start.
- October 18
- A few students asked if this was a group assignment. I did not plan for this to be a group assignment but you can team up with one other person and submit the assignment in a group of two. Be sure to identify the members of the group in your submission and include a writeup on any extra features or problems with your submission.
- October 17
- I posted notes on consensus.
- October 5
- Assignment 3 is posted. This is a short and simple program that uses sockets.
- October 5
- Recitation is canceled today.
- October 4
- The lecture slides for yesterday's lecture are:
- October 2
- I made minor changes to the study guide: some formatting corrections, breaking up a paragraph or two, a little rephrasing of text for: Quality of Service (clarifying hard/soft QoS and DiffServ), Naming (iterative vs. recursive), RPC (clarified multi-canonical for DCE RPC, client vs server activated objects, and the Leasing Distributed Garbage Collector).
- October 1
- You can download a printable version of the Exam 1 study outline. I also fixed some formatting glitches in the web version.
- September 30
-
I've fixed a bunch of spelling errors in the lecture slides (nothing major). On the Networking: Part 2 slides, I added a summary of socket system calls after the coverage of sockets. I also added a set of slides on networking terminology. None of the items therein will be on the exam but you might want to look it over if you're not familiar with basic terms of networking. Finally, I added a link for the recitation on scalability terminology and added some of that material to the exam topics outline list and to the study guide.
This is the set of slides for the exam:
- Introduction, Taxonomy (6 per page)
- Networking terminology (6 per page)
- Data Networking: Part 1 (6 per page)
- Data Networking: Part 2 (6 per page)
- Quality of Service (6 per page)
- Naming and Binding (6 per page)
- Clock Synchronization (6 per page)
- Logical Clocks (6 per page)
- Group Communication (6 per page)
- Scalability Terminology
- Remote Procedure Calls (6 per page)
- Remote Procedure Calls: Case Studies (6 per page)
- September 29
- I posted an outline of topics that you should know for next week's exam. I also posted a study guide that attempts to explain everything you need to know.
- September 26
- The lecture slides for tonight's lecture are:
- September 21
- If you did not submit assignment 1 in recitation, please submit it via sakai before the end of day Friday, September 23.
- September 21
- The second homework assignment is posted and due on September 28. Please keep your answers short. Email me if you're not sure about anything.
- September 19
- The lecture slides for tonight's recitation are:
- September 13
-
The Networking: part 2 (6 per page)
- Quality of service (6 per page)
- Naming and binding (6 per page)
- September 7
- The lecture slides for tonight's recitation are: course intro (6 per page) and networking into (6 per page).
- September 7
- Recitation for 417 is canceled today. The first class will be held tomorrow (a Rutgers Monday) at 5:00pm in Hill-120.
- September 1
- Welcome!
